THOMAS GLAVE (ed.): Duke University Press, 2008.
"...he is dancing, a poet, a black boy / in a culture where masculinity iscode," says the voice of Kevin Everod Quashie, a poet from St. Kitts, inhis 2003 poem "Genesis". What is said and sung by Quashie may wellstand for the root emotion and intellectual drive behind this gathering ofqueer presences from the region where, according to the late Antonio BenítezRojo, the island repeats herself (Antonio's island is female), but is not quitethe same in becoming identical with being beside herself. I refer to the desireand cognitive need to reclaim cultural and political ground denied to gays andlesbians by codes and norms, written and unwritten, aimed at immunizing therepresentative nation and community against the human species misrecognized inany gathered queerness.
In saying"misrecognized", I echo Lacan's term méconnaisance, in this case as theprejudiced and often loud and bashing failure to acknowledge and to recognizeoneself in the other because of being so injured by one's own hate and fear.The specific phobia at work in prejudiced misrecognition widens the inherentgap at the heart of knowing (and of knowledge of) the other: knowledge warpedby disavowal, by the denial of the other's twisted and queer siblinghood withand within oneself.
So clasped ineach other's enactment of knowing and grasping embodied difference (of catchingone's identity caught in one's difference), the ontology of recognition andmisrecognition involves possession and dispossession and the polemics ofownership; as in Thomas Glave's allegory of native growth, "WhoseCaribbean? An Allegory, in Part" (2005), a representative and pivotal essay andthe recommended starting point for sampling the anthology (177-190). Memory isconjured up by Glave and sublimated and queered into a tryout of scripturalthemes. The essay is one among several in which "theory" veers intotestimony and biographic confession, under a signature phrase like: "this iswhat was mine to live" or esto es lo queme tocó vivir. The elegiac tone and substance found in these piecestransform the actuality of the gathering into an occasion to glance back at thepast in the spirit of affirmative mourning for lost lives. These lost lives arenot only those lives lost to death as a biological outcome, or to life's randomchances, but also those lives that the very character of queer livingacknowledges in the twist it puts on surrounding claims to unbending normalcyamong its detractors.
Inwholeheartedly recommending this anthology, I have decided to abjure thegenealogical rule of Noah's Arkname-keeping by not naming authors, except for one poet and the editor, towhose post-patriarchal elegance we owe the gift of this floating and flyingvessel island. Readers interested in further consideration of the book cansimply click on this link to peruse the gathered authorships:
On the practical side, the book isreader-friendly and for the most part free of unnecessary theoretical baggage.It has connectivity with music, literature, the visual arts, and public cultureat large in the Caribbean and its variouslingual domains. It could well anchor a course on the region as a textbook uponwhich to assemble added materials.
On the polemicalside, I wish to quote at length the editor's regrets for authors lost torefusal:
The words lesbianand gay in the title lost this gathering at least two titles: one awoman of Caribbean background who, while erotically interested in other women,has long refused to call herself a lesbian and ... wishes not to have her workinvolved with any text that would categorize her writing as either lesbian incontent or as authored by a lesbian ... the word gay in the title gave pause to the executors of the estate ofSevero Sarduy, the marvelous Cuban writer whose work I have long admired for,among other things, its formidable experimentation with form and content. Iwished very much to include his work here, and would have done so but for theobjections raised by those who, now overseeing his work, did not wish any of itto be associated with a gay volume. (9)
The editor finds such refusals"painful and frustrating, even enraging," and concludes that"the very powerful unwillingness ... to be associated with anything lesbian,gay, or 'queer' illustrates dramatically and often sadly the very need for thisbook" (9).
Inagreeing with Thomas Glave, one may regard such a disavowal of perceived"lesbian" tokenism as a simple act of snobbery. And although the samecould be said about Sarduy's posthumous executors, deeper issues lie in hiscase, dictated by the character and ontology of a writer as blissfully anderotically absorbed in theory, simulation, and the pleasures of earnestdissemblance as he was. For it is not so much excluding Sarduy from the gay label and dress aspreventing him from adopting and wearing them even for fun; not so muchoffering a testimony to his presumed refusal to adopt the gay label in life as issuing the authoritative disavowal-on hisposthumous behalf-to abjure one among many roles he did (and was delighted to)play. There is no better and dismal misrecognition-or a more accurate queerrecognition-of what gay at large meansto us all than the disavowal in-the-name-of-Sarduy imposed by his executors byrefusing to have Sarduy's writing included in this Caribbean gathering oferrant siblings.
Nietzscheonce said that zealots had finally managed to translate Wagner into German.Other custodians have sealed off an ego as porous as Sarduy's into foreclosureagainst the play of labels which he neither feared nor could consider meretokens-he the transformer demon of all that "tokens" us into living.
EduardoGonzález Johns Hopkins University